[Optical Network Startup Lumilens Completes Over $700 Million Series C Financing, Valuation Reaches $5.51 Billion] BlockBeats News, August 7: Optical network startup Lumilens announced the completion of over $700 million in Series C financing, bringing its valuation to $5.51 billion. This round was co-led by Atreides Management, Bain Capital Ventures, Meritech, Seligman Ventures, and Spark Capital. The company’s total funding has now exceeded $900 million. Headquartered in San Jose, California, Lumilens primarily designs and manufactures optical and networking products to enable higher-speed data transmission in data centers with lower power consumption. Lumilens stated that it has begun supplying products under a multi-billion-dollar agreement with a hyperscale cloud provider but declined to disclose the specific name, confirming only that it is one of the four major hyperscale cloud providers. CEO Ankur Singla noted: "The bottleneck for AI has shifted from how many GPUs you can buy to how many GPUs you can connect. Hyperscale cloud providers are telling us they need two things: a significant increase in the optical capacity of existing networks and pathways to directly connect thousands of GPUs into the same cluster." Lumilens also revealed that it has recruited executives and engineers from companies such as Cisco, Juniper, Meta, Marvell, Lumentum, and Coherent to strengthen its expertise in photonics and large-scale networking. The funds from this round will be used to expand engineering and manufacturing operations. [Original Link]